[AZ-Observing] Dave Healy
- From: Tom Polakis <tpolakis@xxxxxxx>
- To: AZ-Observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:56:49 -0400
I recently received news from Wayne Johnson that Dave Healy passed away on June
6. The family wanted to keep the service private, and it was held on Monday.
Wayne wrote the following about Dave.
"Dave with his 32-inch R-C telescope discovered about 500 asteroids along with
Jeff Medkeff who passed away about 7 years ago. For the past several years
Dave's 32-in has been (and still is) being used by a couple HAC members for use
in the search for exo-planets. Dave and his wife, Cheryl, hosted the annual HAC
Christmas Parties for the past 10 years including countless monthly star
parties, which were open to the public. He was also the Astronomical League
Correspondent (ALCor) for HAC so he wasn't just a passive, retired member of
our club. Dave also served on (and made contributions to) the Arizona Astronomy
Board, which lines up funding for the various observatories in the state and
had many professional connections because of it.
It's a shame you have to wait for someone to pass on before you find out more
about them. The same is true for Dave. As was mentioned earlier he had four
children (three girls and a boy) and he would have been married to his wife,
Cheryl, for 50 years later this year. He was not just a marathoner, but a
triatholoner, and apparently participated in about 100 such events (one would
have killed me!). Dave was also a member of a men's choral singing group.
Professionally he was a stockbroker and made his money selling junk bonds,
hence the name of his observatory! When he lived in the New York City area Dave
was an avid member of the Astronomical Society of Long Island and was a pioneer
in early amateur astrophotography, experimenting with cooled emulsion cameras
and, later, hypering film. Many of his astrophotos showed up in S&T and
Astronomy magazines. Dave also wrote articles for those magazines. Though he
officially retired when he moved to Sierra Vista, where he apparently had
ancestors who homesteaded a couple square miles of land near what is now Naco,
south of Bisbee, AZ, you could continue to hear Dave's voice on the radio as an
expert on the car business.
Dave was a kind, intelligent, and generous man to the end and he will be sorely
missed by all of us."
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